Meet Multi-Vendor 4.8.1 with New Tools for Marketplaces

Multi-Vendor 4.8.1 introduces several features designed with marketplaces in mind:

1. The ability and motivation for vendors to pay their debts and fees for using vendor plans.

2. The ability for vendors to specify their locations on Google Maps, so that customers could search for vendors and their products by distance.

3. The ability to distribute money from orders among vendors via PayPal for Marketplaces, a new solution from PayPal that has replaced PayPal Adaptive Payments.

There’s more: Multi-Vendor 4.8.1 includes all the new features of CS-Cart 4.8.1 as well, such as responsive admin panel being the new default, improvements to the Advanced Products Import and GDPR Compliance add-ons, and more. However, below we’ll focus on the features specific to Multi-Vendor.

Vendor Debt Payout

By default, money from orders in Multi-Vendor goes to the marketplace owner, who retains the marketplace’s share and distributes the remaining money among vendors. But things get complicated when vendor plans with monthly fees come into play.

For example, what if a vendor doesn’t have enough orders to cover the ever-accumulating plan fees? Previously, marketplace owners had to contact those vendors and deal with them manually. But with the Vendor Debt Payout add-on you now can:

1. Automatically block the admin panels of those vendors whose debt has reached a certain limit or who weren’t able to pay for their plan in time.

2. Offer vendors a convenient way to pay off their debts and vendor plans fees.

PayPal for Marketplaces

IMPORTANT: The PayPal for Marketplaces integration is currently under the certification process. Stay tuned.

Before the Vendor Debt Payout add-on was a thing, the only way to automate the flow of money was to use a marketplace payment method like PayPal Adaptive Payments or Stripe Connect. Such payment methods distribute money from orders among vendors automatically, taking this burden off the marketplace owner. These payment methods can even withdraw money for the use of the vendor plan from the vendor’s share in an order.

PayPal stopped accepting applications for Adaptive Payments on December 1, 2017. Since then, they have released a new product called PayPal for Marketplaces, which serves the same purpose as Adaptive Payments did. Starting with version 4.8.1, Multi-Vendor has an add-on called PayPal for Marketplaces that allows you to create such a payment method.

The new payment method has 2 advantages over PayPal Adaptive Payments:

1. With Adaptive Payments, the payment process had to be split into multiple steps at checkout when items were being bought from more than 5 vendors. PayPal for Marketplaces no longer has that problem.

2. Marketplace owners can give refunds via PayPal for Marketplaces by using the RMA add-on.

Please note that vendors need to connect their PayPal Business accounts in their administration panels on the Multi-Vendor side before they can receive payments via PayPal for Marketplaces.

This isn’t the full list of changes; if you’d like that, please check the 4.8.1 changelog. For descriptions of other significant features introduced in this 4.8.1, please refer to the CS-Cart 4.8.1 announcement.

The upgrade to version 4.8.1 is already available. As usual, we provide upgrades in batches, so if you don’t see and upgrade in the Upgrade Center, please try again later. Just make sure you have an active upgrade subscription to get the upgrade. You can prolong the subscription in our store.

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This entry was posted
on Tuesday, June 19th, 2018 at 4:28 PM and is filed under CS-Cart releases, News and announcements.
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